


the hollow breath of war

by mstigergun



Series: Inglorious [20]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/F, Gen, M/M, Stabbing, The Arbor Wilds, concerned siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-16
Updated: 2015-12-16
Packaged: 2018-05-07 00:30:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5436698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mstigergun/pseuds/mstigergun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alla hears the news from the rear guard: her brother has been gravely injured. It is a cost she cannot pay to this war, no matter how just its cause.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the hollow breath of war

**Author's Note:**

> Prompted by [playwithdinos](http://playwithdinos.tumblr.com/) for _a frightened kiss_. Originally posted on [Tumblr](http://mstigergun.tumblr.com/post/132637411823/for-the-signs-of-affection-meme-17-pairing-of), and this takes place near the end of the main narrative arc of Inquisition.
> 
> I ran with this in a bit of a different direction and ended up with a platonic focus? Based on my for real experience of playing through the Arbor Wilds with Leonid, who did, indeed, shoot up a red templar camp and then get stabbed in the back while he was too busy making things explode in the distance to notice the stealthy elf behind him (’he’ was too busy watching glittering explosions on the screen) and then Dorian revived him and then it happened again because Leonid’s dumb (’Leonid’ is dumb).

She hears it from a foot soldier who’s run the whole length of the gulley, from the forward push helmed by the Inquisitor all the way back to the rear guard, where Alla’s been holding the red templars at bay and keeping their wounded safe.

“It’s Trevelyan,” gasps the woman, bent over, sweat trickling down her cheek beneath the sharp cut of her helm.

Alla freezes. “What?” she asks, her fingers suddenly very numb around the hilt of her greatsword. “Which one?”

The woman struggles to catch her breath. “Your brother,” she says. “He’s been injured. Upriver with the Qunari mercenaries.”

For a moment, Alla can’t breathe, her chest constricted by her breastplate. Above her, the sky is a hungry blue, the soil beneath her feet already soaked with blood and human misery, with the cost of victory.

But there isn’t time for the dizzy cant of her thoughts. Alla straightens. She nods once, sheathing her sword and turning toward the thick woods to the north. “We’ve thinned out the enemy’s numbers already, but they may make another attempt on our flank. You stay, soldier. I’ll provide support upriver.”

Like that, Alla turns and moves out. She stops only long enough to find Eloise in the midst of the blood and injury her certain hands are mending, her steady mind sorting. The air crackles with magic, the scent sharp enough to cut through the smell of viscera.

“It’s Leonid,” Alla says, her brother’s name hollow in her mouth.

Eloise looks up at her, stare dark as she slowly knits together a man who sobs and writhes beneath her palms. “Alive?”

She’s kind enough to not vocalize the alternative.

“I don’t know,” Alla says. She doesn’t say,  _he needs to be_. She doesn’t say,  _this is beyond me_. Refuses to, when what lies before her remains a void of dreadful unknowing.

“Go.” Firm and unyielding in the way only Eloise can manage while her eyes are still soft. “We’ll be fine here, Alla.”

So Alla does. She isn’t quite sure how she manages, not when her legs are weak beneath her, not when her heartbeat stutters away from its steady, regular rhythm.

 _Leonid_ , she thinks distantly, skull buzzing with too many wretched possibilities to force away. Her  _brother_.

She understands that war has a price. This is not one she can pay.

The forest is eerily quiet as she forces her way upriver, toward the lost temple where surely the Inquisitor makes his final assault. Around her, sunlight cuts through the foliage, though what it illuminates is awful indeed: a river grown thick with blood, the bodies of both ally and enemy alike left broken and pale and  _empty_.

In the distance, she spots a tall shadow crowned with a pair of horns.

She closes the distance on hollow-boned legs, her armour like the weight of the world. An archer, one watching the forest with a wary, flickering stare. He glances her way as she sloshes through the river, her heartbeat a sickly echo in her ears.

“Leonid,” she starts.

The Qunari tilts his head toward an embankment. “Up there.”

She scrambles up the hill, breath tearing from her throat in jagged little gasps. The edges of her vision oscillate with shadow and brightness. How very near she is to the precipice of despair; how little time there is for such a thing.

Alla shoves her way past foliage an almost violent green, one that proclaims  _life_  in a forest riddled with death. She shoulders around the perimeter guards, who barely look her way, only nodding distantly as they stare out at the wilds. Wilds which may have taken everything –

The camp itself is a mess, the remnants of whatever the red templars put in place reduced so smoldering tents, crumpled armour, uneven ramparts erected to give the archers somewhere to perch. In the very center sits Kubrasan, sitting on a barrel and puffing on her pipe. Her bright stare flicks up.

“Where’s –” Alla starts.

“He’s up there,” says the broad-shouldered woman. Blood is spattered across her cheeks, trickles down the length of her throat. “Don’t worry. Serihan’s had a look. He’ll be fine.”

Alla gasps out a sigh of relief, tremulous. “Thank the Maker,” she murmurs, turning immediately to look for her brother on the rampart, which has been cobbled together from disparate felled wood and assorted debris. It looks as unsteady as her heartbeat.

“You’d be better off thanking our Bastion,” Kubrasan says behind her, groaning as she stands and rolls her shoulders. “But go on.”

Alla doesn’t need the encouragement. The moment she spots Basten’s familiar set of horns, the moment her eyes light on the human figure next to him, she works her way toward them – straight as an arrow to its target.

He’s startlingly pale, blood staining the left side of his armour – so much blood, as if someone had started to dye his leathers and had, halfway through, changed their mind. Leonid’s hair is a dark, lank shadow across his forehead, his body curved downward.

He twists his head as she approaches, eyes flaring wide – though the skin beneath them is bruise-dark against his deathly pallor. “Alla,” he says, surprised.

She shoves her way past Basten, and grasps her brother, pressing a furious kiss to his forehead. He smells like blood and sweat and the distant tang of magic. “You  _idiot_ ,” she hisses, holding him hard for a moment against her.

“You don’t even know what happened!” Leonid protests the moment Alla lets him go, her hands shaking in a way that does not speak well to her training.

“Well,” she says, tone flat, “I can safely assume that if you were injured, it was your fault. With all of Kata-Meraad looking out for you, it must have been something  _singularly stupid_ , Leonid.”

“It wasn’t my fault!” her brother insists, pale though he is.

Beside him, Basten makes a low, irritated sound in his throat. “Leonid,” he starts.

“It  _may_  have been my fault,” Leonid amends, leaning to brace himself against one knee as he sits, unsteady, on a crate. One hand finds Basten’s forearm, his knuckles whitening as he holds his lover’s wrist.

Alla looks at Basten, whose features are tight, pained.

Perhaps even panicked.

“What happened?” she asks.

“It was those blighted  _elves_ ,” Leonid says. “I was up here, minding my own business and killing  _an army_  of red templars, and then –”

“He wasn’t watching his back,” Basten says evenly. Hovering over Leonid, standing as close as he can, one hand resting between his shoulders. Steady, though his fingers dig hard at Leonid’s skin, speaking to a desperation –

“No,” snaps Leonid, “I was watching  _yours_. Which is why I got  _stabbed_.”

“Where?” she asks.

“In the  _back_ ,” he says. “And, as it turns out, being stabbed is wretched. Did you know that? I suppose I’d guessed, but the reality is much more unpleasant than anticipated. Look,” and then he lets go of Basten’s wrist and twists.

She stares down at the slice through his armour, edges still wet and dark with his blood.

It’s a killing blow. Or very, very near to one.

“But you’re alright,” Alla repeats numbly. One hand reaches out to touch the torn fabric, the puckered seam of his leathers.

“Well,  _now_  I am,” Leonid says, shifting again to move away. Once again, his hand is on Basten’s wrist, his eyes almost deliriously bright. “I’d have been dead if it weren’t for Basten. I mean, I’m going to have a rather ugly  _scar_  because he’s not nearly so practiced as Serihan – who patched me up the rest of the way – but. You’ll note I’m still breathing. Which is good. I couldn’t at first. Blighted elf got me through the  _lung_.”

Alla looks at Basten, who’s still pale, his jaw tight. She doesn’t say anything, but each of them knows it: had the blade sunk home a fraction of an inch to the right, Leonid would have been dead before he’d hit the ground.

“It’s  _clear_ ,” Leonid continues breezily, though his voice shakes at its very edges, though he sags a little against Basten’s side, “that Andraste loves me  _very much_. I am far too lovely to die. Though apparently not too lovely to stab and leave wheezing on a battlefield. In any case, I was stabbed, and then Basten killed the elf and saved my life, which was very romantic indeed, and then Serihan prettied me up as best she could after Basten’s…  _efforts_. If we’d  _waited_ , she could have left me without a wretched  _scar_.”

“It was either a scar or bleeding out,” Basten says distantly. “Selfishly, I chose for you to live.”

“Oh,” huffs Leonid, still leaning against Basten, “ _I_  don’t mind.  _You’re_  the one who has to look at me.”

“You’ll wear it well.” A pause, then, softer, “Spitfire.”

Her brother tilts his head to look up at Basten, some of the tension draining from his features, a softness in his eyes that makes Alla’s heart ache.

She looks away, out across the camp below.

“How’s everyone else?” Leonid asks after a moment, clearing his throat. “Alive? Relatively intact and unscarred?”

“I don’t know,” Alla says. “I’ve heard that the Inquisitor is at the temple, but we know nothing beyond that. Most of the red templars have been dealt with.”

“So now we wait,” Leonid says.

“We do.”

There are no promises for what lies ahead, Alla thinks. No guarantees that  _anyone_  will make it through unscathed. The tide may have turned but that means little enough. It may, in fact, mean nothing.

After all, a mere finger’s breadth to the right, and her brother would be dead. If he’d been  _alone_ , if he hadn’t been at Basten’s side –

Their hold on this world is so very precarious, despite the victories before them. But, for this moment, it’s sufficient: her brother, alive, his lover steady at his side. There is no point in looking beyond that, though she allows herself the span of a heartbeat to hope that, if Leonid’s been spared in this, the others may be as well. Alla does not trust in Andraste’s guiding hand, but she will permit herself this much: that perhaps, even in the midst of this wretched war, they have earned this small measure of kindness.


End file.
